Jack spent most of those first days staring at his daughter’s back. He watched her good hand, the one that wasn’t in a cast, glide across a keyboard. Angelina worked fast, and clearly, Crostini, the Hitchcock blonde of a boss, was pleased. She leaned against his daughter’s little desk, randomly picking up then putting down pens and paperclip holders. Angelina looked down at Crostini’s alligator-skin high heels and asked her how long it’d taken her to get her master’s degree.

“Ms. Moltisanti, if you keep blazing through the assignments, I’m going to have to get more creative,” Crostini laughed. “Don’t you know I’m an engineer? We don’t docreative.”

Jackie was from Newport, Rhode Island, which as far as Franny knew was Nowhere, Rhode Island, and even though she was from Brooklyn, they both felt like total rubes at Barnard, where all the city girls wore going-out clothes to English class just because they felt like it. Their dormitory room was exactly the same as all the others on the hall, narrow and Spartan, perfect for two eighteen-year-old nuns. Jackie tried to spruce it up with some pictures she’d cut out of magazines, mostly models dressed up to look like Ali MacGraw. The two girls tried to do the same—sweeping bell-bottoms and collegiate sweaters. The effect was not great on Jackie, with shoulders as wide as an Iowan football player or on Fran, who stood just over five feet and had to hem every pair of pants by several inches, sometimes cutting off the bells entirely.